Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Sunday he had ordered a review of police and intelligence services after two gunmen shot and killed 15 people at a Jewish festival in Bondi Beach.
A father and son are accused of spraying bullets at a family-filled Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s most famous beach on December 14, allegedly inspired by the “ideology of the Islamic State”.
Albanese said his government would examine whether police and spy services have the powers, structures and sharing arrangements “to keep Australians safe”.
“The atrocity inspired by ISIS last Sunday reinforces the rapidly changing security environment in our nation,” he said, using an acronym for the Islamic State group.
“Our security agencies should be in the best position to respond.”
Alleged gunman Sajid Akram, 50, was shot and killed by police during the Bondi attack. An Indian citizen, he entered Australia on a visa in 1998.
His 24-year-old son Naveed, a citizen born in Australia, remains in hospital under police guard and faces several charges, including terrorism and 15 murders.
– ‘A shocking event’ –
The son was investigated by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization in 2019 for possible radicalization but was found not to pose a threat at the time, according to Australian authorities.
His father was also questioned by the intelligence service as part of that review, but managed to obtain a weapons license allowing him to own six firearms.
A few weeks before the Bondi Beach attack, the couple returned to Sydney from a four-week trip to the southern Philippines which is now being investigated by detectives there and in Australia.
Albanese said there were “real issues” with Australia’s intelligence service in light of the attack.
“We have to examine exactly the way those systems work. We have to look back at what happened in 2019 when this person was examined, the assessment that was made,” he told national broadcaster ABC.
Asked in a separate interview about the alleged gunmen’s stay at a hotel on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, Albanese said their radicalization was under investigation.
“But it is also the case that they did not appear as persons of interest, which is why this is such a shocking event,” he said.
– ‘Very, very unusual’ –
There is a long history of Islamist insurgencies in the Mindanao region but authorities there say there is no evidence to suggest the Philippines is being used to train extremists.
Staff at Davao City’s GV Hotel told AFP that the two men were holed up in their small room for most of their 28-day stay.
They usually left their rooms for only two or three hours, with the longest excursion lasting eight hours, the Philippine national security service said.
The regional police, trawling through CCTV images to retrace the pair’s steps and discover who they met, said the father had visited a gun shop.
Clarke Jones, a criminologist at the Australian National University, said it was “very, very unusual” to have a father and son as suspected perpetrators.
Once in the Philippines, the pair could easily travel to Mindanao without raising any flags, he told AFP.
Jones, who has worked with violent offenders in the Philippines, said the alleged radicalization of the gunmen had apparently gone “under the radar” for years after the Australian intelligence probe.
“I think we really need to look at what happened, and whether that child, when he was first discovered, should have gone through some kind of support program to prevent this potential thing from happening,” he said.
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